Fun Home - Young Vic

Saw Fun Home with my dad. That was fun. My brother took my mum to Oedipus, mind, so he still wins.

“All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unlike in its own way”.

What I found hard to watch in Fun Home is that Fun Home is about “happy families” (or to rephrase that, fun homes...). It’s about families who smile for the cameras, with daughters in pretty dresses, who “polish and shine” – and what we have to repress to get there. Fun Home is one of the best shows about repression and unresolved lives you could hope to see; about family and all the mess that comes with; about love too. I found it a wringing look at how we lie to ourselves and each other, then a fantastical musical about why we should accept. Ultimately this all converges a message of hope, love, mess and reality. It’s complicated, and messy, but uplifting, optimistic, gentle, and wonderful.

“Chaos never happens if it’s never seen”. This line is through what I read the piece: keeping parts of ourselves unseen – because we consider it chaotic – and what that does. No other artwork deals with emotional repression so horribly accurately, yet so subtly. How many sentences, lines in song, are left unfinished? In fact, how many moments – the siblings playing games, Alison watching TV – are interrupted? More psychologically, what about Alison’s diary entries: “Saw a dead body today. Went swimming” – the necessary emotional response itself is interrupted. Compare in an early song “He wants, he wants, he wants…” with Teenage Alison’s own “I want I want I want I...”, or with Young Alison’s later “I feel… I want… to… I mean…” – most musicals have an ‘I want’ song, but to have the crucial ‘I want’ unfinished, repressed, explicitly unable to be expressed... What’s its other leitmotif? “Maybe not right now”. Thoughts aren’t given time to be thoughts, emotions are left unsaid then unfelt – for Bruce because of small-town America, for Alison because of Bruce, for Helen because of her family. Through both being so deeply closeted, we see where this repression ends up – self-doubt at best, suicide at worst. Of course this converges with the telephone wire duet, a fantasy all about hindsight and the realisation that, ultimately, what is left unsaid right now may always remain unsaid – which is why to keep Helen so repressed but for one song tells more than her singing twenty songs could (everyone is hurt by someone else’s repression), and why to end this on a contemplative note is ideal. In Alison there’s hope, but in all of it there’s great psychological realism.

In behaviour, Bruce later expresses jealousy of Alison’s freedom to come out, but how many false starts did Alison have before she was able to feel free – and is old Alison free of Bruce? For Bruce, society represses him, whilst for Alison family does, the self does – both bring different horrors. Thus through Bruce it’s a broadly political piece about why societal prejudices are so dangerous, and through Alison it’s a study of the unconscious and unspoken but ever-present prejudices of those we love, and fear – and the juxtaposition of father/daughter shows how interlinked, and dangerous, these two repressions are; about how dangerous any and all repression is. Having written that, I really think this oversimplifies it, and makes it more of a ‘think piece’ than a ‘character piece’ when it’s both – and as a character piece it’s bloody heartbreaking from beginning to end, its book almost documentarian in how easily it portrays its characters’ home lives.

The genius of musicalising, not dramatising, is that chaos never happens if it’s never seen – but heard? A documentarian drama about repression remains repressed – the music liberates it. Like all families (like Tolstoy), to leave something unspoken seems safe, but by having romantic strings under Bruce’s nervy flirtations, metronomic control under Helen’s lines, that doorbell arpeggio leitmotif to let us enter the fun home, the chaos unseen is nonetheless felt through every unfinished musical melody. Anyone who has ever hidden anything from their family – or who has had something hidden away from them – can recognise the setting, the speech, the scenario, but hear the inner yearnings in the music.

Except the funeral parlour song, that was just badass.

This cast, incidentally, is perfect – all have form at playing characters saying it all behind the eyes. Bruce is portrayed with strange, unpredictable unknowability, yet Varla lets us understand him and care despite keeping his distance, from his stilted precision earlier to his manic open-eyed floundering as it finished, both twisted forms of the free person he wants to be. Jenna Russell can play everyday so well (perhaps the most difficult thing to do) and broke me in “Days and Days”. All three Alisons have a curiosity and eager determination that, as that curiosity becomes more adult and grounded, feels like the evolution of one person.

I also loved the simplicity of the intimate staging, and especially what seemed deliberate allusions to comic-panels – very two-dimensional blocking, especially with shadows against a white wall (just occasional fleeting visual cues, thought that was very cute). My reading of the late set reveal was that, when the children were children, none of it actually mattered – the family really mattered more – but the more Bruce developed the house the less he developed himself, thus building quite a hideous cathedral to his own repression – “polish and shine”. Or possibly it’s just a metaphor for Alison now seeing things as they are in reality, though I prefer to read it as Bruce not seeing things as they are.

At its heart, Fun Home is an absolute celebration of freedom and being yourself, because on the surface it’s the inverse of this – a wrenching study of kowtowing to the pressures society, family, convention demand. The book itself tells a story only half-spoken, but the music speaks for the family’s suppressed emotions. Whether it’s Helen unable to come to terms with what Bruce can’t finish, or Adult Alison unable to do the same… And incidentally, I don’t think I’ve used the word ‘lesbian’ once, because so simply does the drama accept Alison and Bruce as gay and the drama is about the worlds prohibiting them from coming out, repression a villain and homosexuality a given – and that makes it high amongst the best piece of LGBT art I’ve ever seen. I have a tin ear for ‘be yourself’ works, but the difference with Fun Home is it never pretends that being yourself, for anyone (Bruce/Helen/Alison, gay/straight, male/female, whatever job or hobby or lifestyle), isn’t chaotic, but to ‘polish and to shine’ for society is to begin on a path with more chaotic consequences. Instead, it argues, always see – never repress, always accept.

P.S. Quick note that the sound balance in the first song or two wasn’t great, but was a lot better afterwards, so kudos to whoever’s on the soundboard for picking up on a problem and solving it.

P.P.S. Also, I’ve been going to the Young Vic for years, but never eaten at the Young Vic. It’s lovely! Had a delicious grapefruit lemonade, an exquisite vegan burger, and a cheesecake which is apparently a tribute to The Inheritance.

P.P.P.S. I’ve got to say somewhere that David Lan is a genius and a hero of mine and will be much missed.

P.P.P.P.S. All of that said, it’s still only my second favourite musical based on a comic book…